Food Studies Commons^™

Unveiling Food Waste Patterns At Purdue University, Katherine S. Chiparus, Abigail S. Engelberth, Valentina Negri, Louis Tay

Discovery Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Research Internship

Ever wondered how much food waste is generated at Purdue University—or how we compare to other Big Ten schools? This project aims to both evaluate existing practices and behaviors across major universities, and administer a survey to collect data on Purdue’s campus. AI-assisted photo deconstruction and demographic data collection is used to analyze Purdue’s food waste composition and behavior patterns. Concurrently, a comparative analysis of food waste strategies - including categorization of effectiveness, reach, and transparency of waste management efforts while focusing on composting, diversion programs, and dining hall operations - across Big Ten institutions was conducted. To date, the …

Agricultural Productivity And Climate Mitigation, Keith O. Fuglie, Thomas W. Hertel, David B. Lobell, Nelson B. Villoria

Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

Agriculture will play a central role in meeting greenhouse gas (GHG) emission targets, as the sector currently contributes ∼22% of global emissions. Because emissions are directly tied to resources employed in farm production, such as land, fertilizer, and ruminant animals, the productivity of input use tends to be inversely related to emissions intensity. We review evidence on how productivity gains in agriculture have contributed to historical changes in emissions, how they affect land use emissions both locally and globally, and how investments in research and development (R&D) affect productivity and therefore emissions. The world average agricultural emissions intensity fell by …

Integrated Modeling Of Nature’S Role In Human Well-Being: A Research Agenda, Rebecca Chaplin-Kramer, Stephen Polasky, Rob Alkemade, Neil D. Burgess, William W.L. Cheung, Ingo Fetzer, Mike Harfoot, Thomas W. Hertel, Samantha L.L. Hill, Justin Andrew Johnson, Jan H. Janse, Patrick José V. Jeetze, Hyejin Kim, Jan J. Kuiper, Eric Lonsdorf, David Leclère, Mark Mulligan, Garry D. Peterson, Alexander Popp, Stephanie Roe, Aafke M. Schipper, Tord Snäll, Arnout Van Soesbergen, Aline C. Soterroni, Elke Stehfest, Detlef P. Van Vuuren, Piero Visconti, Lan Wang-Erlandsson, Geoff Wells, Henrique M. Pereira

Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

Integrated assessment models that incorporate biodiversity and ecosystem services could be an important tool for improving our understanding of interconnected social-economic-ecological systems, and for analyzing how policy alternatives can shift future trajectories towards more sustainable development. Despite recent scientific and technological advances, key gaps remain in the scientific community’s ability to deliver information to decision-makers at the pace and scale needed to address sustainability challenges. We identify five research frontiers for integrated social-economic-ecological modeling (primarily focused on terrestrial systems) to

incorporate biodiversity and ecosystem services: 1) downscaling impacts of direct and indirect drivers on eco- systems; 2) incorporating feedbacks in …

Assessing Effects Of Climate And Technology Uncertainties In Large Natural Resource Allocation Problems, Jevgenijs Steinbuks, Yongyang Cai, Jonas Jaegermeyr, Thomas W. Hertel

Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

The productivity of the world's natural resources is critically dependent on a variety of highly uncertain factors, which obscure individual investors and governments that seek to make long-term, sometimes irreversible, investments in their exploration and utilization. These dynamic considerations are poorly represented in disaggregated resource models, as incorporating uncertainty into large-dimensional problems presents a challenging computational task. In this paper, we apply the SCEQ algorithm (Cai and Judd, 2023) to solve a large-scale dynamic stochastic global land resource use problem with stochastic crop yields due to adverse climate impacts and limits on further technological progress. For the same model parameters …

A Modelled Estimate Of Food Access Within Countries Shows That Inequality Within Countries Has Increased Despite Rising Equality Between Countries, Juan Diego Martinez, Navin Ramankutty, Zia Mehrabi, Tom W. Hertel

Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

Global food calorie supply per person is more than 2900 kcal per day on average, but we have failed to ensure equitable access to these calories. Yet how uneven food access is within countries has remained poorly understood, as has the progress made over the past five decades on closing the access gap. Using publicly available data, we developed a theoretically-grounded statistical model to estimate the cross-national relationship between average per capita expenditure and per capita food availability and used this to estimate within-country access to food for income deciles in 135 countries. We find that, from 1961 to 2013, …

Evaluating The Social Impact Of Culinary Experiences, A Question Of Scales And Methods., Laura Arciniegas

GSTC Academic Symposium - In conjunction with the GSTC Global Conference

No abstract provided.

Is Northwest Indiana Prepared To Be A “Climate Haven”?, Luke Carl Jorgensen

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Market-Mediated Effects: What Are They? And Why Are They Important For Geospatial Analysis Of Sustainability Policies, Iman Haqiqi, Zhan Wang, Srabashi Ray, Uris Baldos, Jing Liu, Thomas Hertel

I-GUIDE Forum

Market-mediated effects can mitigate or amplify the intended effects of sustainability policies. They can also have unintended consequences, including inducing new sustainability stresses or threatening food security. It is important to understand these effects when designing sustainability policies. This paper provides prominent examples of market-mediated effects of a variety of sustainability policies in the food, energy, land and water nexus. This paper reviews the empirical evidence on market-mediated impacts of economic policies generally and then provides a review of recent geospatial modeling aimed at capturing these impacts in the context of local and regional land and water sustainability policies. The …

I-Guide Climbers: A Model For Multidisciplinary Academic Labs For Early Career Development, Iman Haqiqi, Wei Hu, Ramya Kumaran, Pin-Ching Li, Nicholas Manning, Alex Michels, Ayman Nassar, Jinwoo Park, Jimeng Shi, Adam Tonks, Zhaonan Wang

I-GUIDE Forum

In this paper, we propose a new form of multidisciplinary academic collaboration that goes beyond the traditional modes of knowledge exchange. We argue that most research collaboration today is based on interactions between closely related disciplines, in which researchers share data, methods, and insights within a common framework or problem. However, such collaboration may not foster the development of the communication and management skills essential to a multi-disciplinary research career. Therefore, we suggest establishing a network of researchers from divergent, yet complementary, disciplines who are interested in improving these skills through regular interactions and feedback. The main goal of this …

Focus On Global–Local–Global Analysis Of Sustainability, Thomas W. Hertel, Elena Irwin, Stephen Polasky, Navin Ramankutty

Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

This special issue is the outcome of a workshop held at Purdue University in April 2022. It comprises thematic syntheses of five overarching dimensions of the Global-to-Local-to-Global (GLG) challenge to ensuring the long-term sustainability of land and water resources. These thematic dimensions include: climate change, ecosystems and biodiversity, governance, water resources and cyberinfrastructure. In addition, there are eight applications of GLG analysis to specific land and water sustainability challenges, ranging from environmental stress in the Amazon River Basin to groundwater depletion in the United States. Based on these papers, we conclude that, without fine-scale, local analysis, interventions focusing on land …

Investing In Nature Can Improve Equity And Economic Returns, Justin Andrew Johnson, Uris Baldos, Erwin Corong, Thomas Hertel, Stephen Polasky, Raffaello Cervigni, Toby Roxburgh, Giovanni Ruta, Colette Salemi, Sumil Thakrar

Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

Sustainable development requires jointly achieving economic development to raise standards of living and environmental sustainability to secure these gains for the long run. Here, we develop a local-to-global, and global-to-local, earth-economy model that integrates the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP)-computable general equilibrium model of the economy with the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model of fine-scale, spatially explicit ecosystem services. The integrated model, GTAP–InVEST, jointly determines land use, environmental conditions, ecosystem services, market prices, supply and demand across economic sectors, trade across regions, and aggregate performance metrics like GDP. We use the integrated model to analyze the …

Global Drivers Of Local Water Stresses And Global Responses To Local Water Policies In The United States, Iman Haqiqi, Laura Bowling, Sadia Jame, Uris Baldos, Jing Liu, Thomas Hertel

Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

The rapid depletion of US groundwater resources and rising number of dying wells in the Western USbrings attention to the significance of groundwater governance and sustainability restrictions. However, such restrictions on groundwater withdrawals are likely to generate spillover effects causing further environmental stresses in other locations and adding to the complexity of sustainability challenges. The goal of this paper is to improve our understanding of the implications of growing global food demand for local sustainability stresses and the implications of local sustainability policies for local, regional, and global food production, land use, and prices. We employ SIMPLE-G-US (Simplified International Model …

Local, Regional, And Global Adaptations To A Compound Pandemic-Weather Stress Event, Iman Haqiqi, Danielle S. Grogan, Marziyeh Bahalou Horeh, Jing Liu, Uris Baldos, Richard Lammers, Thomas W. Hertel

Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

Global food security can be threatened by short-term extreme events that negatively impact food production, food purchasing power, and agricultural economic activity. At the same time, environmental pollutants like greenhouse gases (GHGs) can be reduced due to the same short-term extreme stressors. Stress events include pandemics like COVID-19 and widespread droughts like those experienced in 2015. Here we consider the question: what if COVID-19 had co-occurred with a 2015-like drought year? Using a coupled biophysical-economic modeling framework, we evaluate how this compound stress would alter both agricultural sector GHG emissions and change the number of undernourished people worldwide. We further …

Costs Of Forest Carbon Sequestration In The Presence Of Climate Change Impacts, Alla Golub, Brent Sohngen, Yongyang Cai, John Kim, Thomas Hertel

Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

Forests play a critical role in mitigating climate change, and, at the same time, are predicted to experience large-scale impacts of climate change that will affect the efficiency of forests in mitigation efforts. Projections of future carbon sequestration potential typically do not account for the changing economic costs of timber and agricultural production and land use change. We integrated a dynamic forward-looking economic optimization model of global land use with results from a dynamic global vegetation model and meta-analysis of climate impacts on crop yields to project future carbon sequestration in forests. We find that the direct impacts of climate …

Rethinking The Monstrous: Gender, Otherness, And Space In The Cinematic Storytelling Of Arrival And The Shape Of Water, Edward Chamberlain

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Through comparing the Hollywood films Arrival and The Shape of Water, this article explicates the films’ similar portrayals of gender, social collaboration, and monstrosity. Although the mainstream media in the United States has linked the idea of the monstrous to larger global forces, the two films suggest that “the monster” exists much closer to home. Hence, this article makes the case that monstrosity occurs in a variety of formulations such as the actions of national authorities like governmental officials that oppress and endanger a myriad of American citizens as well as newcomers. Further, this article makes the case that …

Growing Local: The Role Of Urban Gardening In Fostering Food Security, Sustainability, And Community, Franklin Wagner, Lindsey Payne

Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement

The downtown center of Lafayette, Indiana is situated in a food desert where access to healthy, nutritious food can be limited. Urban gardens are an effective way to increase access to healthy alternatives while also providing a number of benefits to the surrounding area, including opportunities for community growth, education, and physical activity. In summer 2016, researchers from Purdue University collaborated with Lafayette’s GrowLocal Urban Gardens Network (GrowLocal) to perform a baseline analysis of the current community gardening initiatives, and explore the possibilities for expansion, development, and future community involvement through urban gardening.

Both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods …

Food Insecurity Rudimentary Education For Local Youth, Nam-Anh Nguyen, Quynh Nguyen, Ellisa Defur, Daniel Lin, Jennifer Mansfield, Jane Krause

Engagement & Service-Learning Summit

No abstract provided.